Career

If you are one of those kinds of people who make their important life decisions based on zodiac signs and the magic of astrology, you might be interested to know that your star sign has probably changed. Say what? Yeah, you read right, and it’s O.K to freak out! (Cosmopolitan)

Would you care to become so good you can’t be ignored? Here is why and how.(Lifehack)

Broke entrepreneurs, business fund seekers… If you’ve been down that road before, you’ll agree that raising money for a startup can be quite stressful! But here’s why entrepreneurs and founders should care where their VCs get their money. (TechCrunch)

The 5 elements that hinder your company’s development and are harmful to your organizational culture. (Entrepreneur)

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” –Winston Churchill. Dr. Travis Bradberry gives excellent tips on the “8 Ways Smart People Use Failure To Their Advantage.” (Forbes)

#Futureofwork– The Future of work is here. And it’s here to stay. No need for chills and goosebumps- Josh Bersin explains the three simple parts of the ‘Future of Work.’ (Forbes)

Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade accused the British business of becoming “too lazy and too fat.” He said that businessmen and women prefer to “golf on a Friday afternoon” instead of working. (The Telegraph)

The idea of a basic income for every person has been popping up regularly in recent years.

Economists, think tanks, activists and politicians from different stripes have toyed with the idea of governments giving every citizen or resident a minimum income off which to live. This cash transfer could either replace or supplement existing welfare payments.

However, the most important advantage of basic income may not be in its practical application but rather in how it could change the way we think and talk about poverty and inequality.

Benefits of a basic income

Giving every resident an unconditional grant, regardless of whether you are a billionaire or destitute, is a significant departure from our existing welfare state. The latter offers only limited and conditional support when working is not an option.

Support for a basic income comes from very disparate political and ideological circles.

Some libertarians like basic income because it promises a leaner state without a large bureaucracy checking people’s eligibility and policing their behavior. Others see it as enabling entrepreneurialism – the poor helping themselves.

On the left, many see basic income as an opportunity to plug numerous holes in the social safety net or even to free people from “wage slavery.” For feminists, basic income is a successor to the old demand for wages for housework.

Jobs are no longer sole answer to poverty

When discussing inequality, we usually focus on employment and production. Yet, much of the world’s population has no realistic prospects of employment, and we already produce more than what is sustainable.

Basic income, however, separates survival from employment or production.

Our current answers to poverty and inequality stem from Fordism, the New Deal and Social Democracy. They center on wage labor: get more people into jobs, protect them in the workplace, pay better wages and use taxes on wages to fund a limited system of social security and welfare.

It would seem that to get people out of poverty, you have to get them into jobs. Politicians across the spectrum agree. Is there a politician who does not promise more jobs?

In most of the Global South, whole generations are growing up without realistic prospects for employment. We cannot develop the world solely by getting people into jobs, encouraging them to start small businesses or teaching them how to farm (as if they didn’t already know). The painful reality is that most people’s labor is no longer needed by increasingly efficient global chains of production.

In economic speak, a large portion of the world’s population is surplus to the needs of capital. They have no land, no resources and no one to whom they can sell their labor.

South Africa and jobless growth

Thus, to believe that jobs or economic growth is going to address this crisis of global poverty seems naive.

The example of South Africa is telling. In a comparatively rich country where youth unemployment runs at more than 60 percent, pensions, childcare and disability grants are for many households the most important source of income. Yet many slip through the cracks of this limited welfare state.

As a healthy adult male, you stand little chance of either receiving a government benefit or finding decent employment, as economic growth has been largely jobless. For an adult without children, disability is the only access to these crucial grants.

In the early 2000s, a movement emerged in support of a very modest Basic Income Grant (BIG) of 100 rand (less than US$12 in 2002) per month. Significantly, this campaign received the support of the government-appointed Taylor Committee. Its report concluded that a BIG was likely fiscally sustainable and would lift as many as six million people out of poverty. It argued that this result could not be achieved by expanding existing welfare programs. However, the proposal was dismissed by the ANC, which continued to see employment as the only solution to poverty and inequality.

Not surprisingly, basic income campaigns have been prominent in countries with high socioeconomic inequality, like South Africa. These countries have both significant resources and a need for redistribution. In neighboring Namibia, another country with extreme inequality, a similar campaign has received growing support.

Furthermore, as the Club of Rome already realized in 1972, the productivist bias of our usual answers to inequality – grow more, produce more and grow the economy so that people can consume more – is ultimately unsustainable. Surely, in a world already characterized by overproduction and overconsumption, producing and consuming more cannot be the answer. Yet, these seem to be the answers with which we are stuck: grow, grow, grow.

Give a man a fish

To move beyond these defunct politics, we may need to think about distribution rather than production, a point powerfully argued by anthropologist James Ferguson. For Ferguson, giving a man a fish might be more useful than teaching him to fish.

The problem of global inequality is not that we do not produce enough to provide for the world’s population. It is about the distribution of resources. This is why the idea of a basic income is so important: it discards the assumption that in order to get the income you need to survive, you should be employed or at least engaged in productive labor. Assumptions of this kind are untenable when for so many there are no realistic prospects for employment.

This does not mean that basic income is a panacea. There are too many potential problems to list here. Yet, to give just a few examples: those countries whose populations would need it most might be least able to afford such schemes. And, basic income grants that are small enough to be politically acceptable may actually further impoverish the poorest if basic income replaces other grants.

Moreover, if people get money merely because they are citizens or residents of a country – shareholders in the wealth of that country – these claims become very susceptible to nationalist and xenophobic exclusion. Indeed, during recurrent episodes of xenophobic violence in South Africa, many explained their dislike of foreigners by accusing them of receiving welfare grants and public housing that should be going to South Africans.

Despite these problems, it is important to start experimenting with alternatives and to start thinking about distribution rather than production. After all, the welfare system that we have now also resulted from longstanding debates, experiments that were once considered unrealistic, ad hoc improvements and partial victories.

I was surprised when i read about Saatchi & Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts thoughts on gender diversity. Roberts told Business Insider that didn’t think the lack of women in leadership roles was a problem in the advertising industry, and that the debate on Gender inequality in his industry was ‘over.’ -Oh Really?!

Well, according to sources, he stepped down after sparking the roar, and later apologized for his comments. (Read more on The Guardian)

Apology accepted! But i must confess that i didn’t expect that from such a high profile man!

I’m also tempted to ask – Why on earth would he say such a thing? And how many more agree with him?

Certainly not US President, Barack Obama who publicly called himself a feminist. How awesome!

Or Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau who understands what it’s like to be living in the 21 century!

There’s an excellent report by McKinsey on “How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth” which explains in depth why the public, private, and social sectors will need to work on closing gender gaps in work and society. (Read all about it here)

Big as the prize may be, gender equality still eludes companies around the globe. Despite modest improvements in the past few years, women are underrepresented at every level in the corporate pipeline—especially the senior level

The guide offers a solution for executives to think about pressing forward with their own gender initiatives. Read on here